Mansfield, Conn. - The Trinity College softball team staved off a late Warrior rally to come away with a 5-4 victory in the first game of a doubleheader on Thursday evening versus Eastern Connecticut State at Clyde Washburne Field. The Bantams dropped the second game, 10-0, to split the twinbill and move to 12-10 on the year. ECSU, ranked No. 9 in New England, now sit at 22-8 overall. Trinity turns around and travels to Maine on Friday for a New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) East doubleheader at Bates College. The third game of the series, originally scheduled as the second game of a Saturday doubleheader, was moved to Sunday, April 28, due to Saturday's forecasted rain.

Trinity scored twice in the first and three times in the third inning of game one which proved enough for the victory. Three Bantams turned in multi-hit efforts, led by sophomore 1B Gillian Birk (Westport, Conn.) who went 3-for-4 with a run scored and an RBI. Senior tri-captain C Nicole Towner (Erie, Colo.) and sophomore LF Samantha Witmer (Drexel Hill, Pa.) both recorded a pair of hits with Towner driving in a pair of runs and Witmer scoring twice. Junior Madeline Spencer-Orrell (Northampton, Mass.) earned her seventh win of the year in the circle, striking out three in four innings of work, before junior tri-captain Lindsay Pressman (Huntington, N.Y.) came on and threw three innings of one-hit ball to pick up her second save of the spring. 

Trinity jumped ahead with a pair of runs in the top of the first thanks to RBIs from senior tri-captain SS Courtney Erickson (Everett, Mass.) and sophomore CF Jenna Thomas (Orange, Conn.). Erickson brought home the game's first run on a RBI-ground out before Thomas came up right after and crushed a run-scoring double that plated Witmer. 

The Warriors got one back in the home half of the second inning on a solo homer off the bat of Brooke Matyasovsky (Orange, Conn.) but the Bantams answered with three more in the following frame. With two outs, Birk singled to center, scoring Witmer to extend the lead to 3-1. Towner followed with a two-run double to centerfield that scored Birk and Erickson to make it a 5-1 lead. Matyasovsky homered again in the bottom of the third, this time a two-run shot, to cut the deficit to 5-3. 

ECSU showed life down two in its final at bats to make things interesting. The Warriors scored on a Trinity fielding miscue to cut the deficit to just one. Another Bantam error later in the inning put the winning run at first with two out, however, Pressman induced a ground ball to short to end the game and seal the victory for the visitors. 

Game two was all ECSU as the Warriors scored ten runs on ten hits in the six inning game. ECSU starter Haleigh Cardello (Litchfield, N.H.) held the Bantams to just four hits in the complete-game shutout. The Warriors opened up a 5-0 lead after the second thanks largely in part to a grand slam off the bat of Megan Hodgdon (Cheshire, Conn.). After a run in both the third and fourth innings, Hodgdon hit a three-run homer to walk off for the run-rule win.